Vandana Shiva is a prominent Indian-born environmentalist who has emerged as one of the world's most prominent critics of conventional agriculture and biotechnology. In the most recent sign of her iconic status, earlier this month, Beloit College in Wisconsin conferred on her a prestigious honor as the Weissberg Chair in International Studies, calling her a "one-woman movement for peace, sustainability and social justice.”

Whether that accurately describes Shiva is debatable—there appears to be a sizable gap between her self-representations and the subjects she claims to be an expert on. However her status as a celebrity activist is not in question. Shiva’s unbridled opposition to GMOs has made her a favorite in liberal and environmental circles. She hopscotches the globe, making frequent appearances at anti-GMO rallies, on college campuses and on lecture tours, most recently last week in Costa Rica.

Shiva is perhaps best known for claiming that the introduction of genetically modified cotton seeds in India has led to mass genocide by poor farmers seduced by the 'false promise' of GMOs.

“270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market,” she has said. “It’s genocide.”

That’s a remarkable claim, and if true it is a tragedy of staggering proportions. If it's not, it's demagogic. What are the facts?

Shiva’s celebrity and her claims

Vandana Shiva was born in the valley of Dehradun in India in 1952. Educated in her homeland, she eventually pursued graduate studies in Canada, receiving an MA at Guelph and a PhD at the University of Western Ontario. A dedicated activist, she founded Navdanya – meaning “Nine Seeds” – more than two decades ago. According to its website, its organizational mandate is “to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, and to promote organic farming and fair trade.” Under her guidance Navdanya has evolved into a national movement.

Shiva is an energetic campaigner against globalization and a vocal critic of agricultural genetic engineering—GMOs. She has written more than 20 books. In Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest and Water Wars, she examined the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate-led globalization. The Violence of Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind challenged what she referred to as the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, reductionist Green Revolution agriculture.

Many prominent intellectuals herald her as a forward-thinking scientist and expert in genetic engineering. When Beloit conferred its honorarium upon her, and in accompanying news releases and the website announcement touting her selection, it prominently noted her “PhD in nuclear physics,” calling her “a recognized expert on agriculture and biotechnology.”

Are those claims accurate?

Shiva believes so. “ I am also a scientist… a Quantum Physicist”, she writes on her Navdanya website. The speakers bureau that represents her identifies her as “a trained physicist.” Hundreds of organizations and prominent journalists, from universities to Bill Moyers toNational Geographic(which referred to her asa “nuclear physicist turned agro-ecologist”), have represented her that way.

But those representations are incorrect. According to the University of Western Ontario, where she received her PhD, her doctorate is not in the discipline of physics, as she claims, but in philosophy. It focused on the highly technical and often politicized debate over a central notion in physics known as Bells’ Theorem, which has been called the “most profound” theory in science.

Perhaps foreshadowing her current contentious views about modern agriculture, Shiva concluded that quantum mechanics in physics was philosophically invalid and factually doubtful. The main thesis of quantum mechanics that she challenged has since been confirmed by experimental physics, meaning that her thesis stands at odds with factual reality. Independent of the quality of her philosophical research, it is a substantive leap to go from earning a PhD in the Philosophy of Science to self-identifying as a “scientist,” “nuclear physicist” or “quantum physicist”—the various ways she refers to herself.

Shiva also claims to have written more than 300 papers—a factoid echoed in almost every article or news release about her, including on Beloit’s site. A query of Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science (research platform for information in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities) returns only 42 records of peer reviewed papers or publications authored by Shiva since 1980.